Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to buil...d the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. We say that a... sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared ...the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »